and your heart's against my chest
by Mia-Zeklos
Summary: "Just follow my lead," Jace's voice came from behind her as he made a few more uncertain steps backwards and Maia frowned under the hands covering her eyes. "We're almost there." Jace/Maia


**Notes: Written for shadowhuntersbetas's gift exchange over on tumblr. All the participants were revealed now and I can post this publically, so here it is. Feedback is always welcome!**

"Just follow my lead," Jace's voice came from behind her as he made a few more uncertain steps backwards and Maia frowned under the hands covering her eyes. "We're almost there."

"Almost _where_?" They hadn't left the Institute, that much she could tell, but there were considerably fewer people around them now. The last thing she'd seen before Jace had asked her to close her eyes had been yet another hallway and a door at the end of it, which didn't mean much in here, and now she was left relying on the rest of her senses. There was Jace, unmistakably, right behind her and another Shadowhunter who'd appeared more recently – Isabelle? – somewhere close by. One of Jace's hands disappeared and she could _hear_ him gesturing frantically before the door behind them opened and the sudden smell of magic hit her full force.

It was a very specific kind of magic and it was enough to make her stop in her tracks.

"Jace, _no_." Had he lost his mind? Walking through a portal without knowing where you were going ranked among the worst possible ideas she could imagine. "I'm not spending my birthday stuck in limbo because you didn't want to pay for plane tickets."

"It'd still be a better birthday location than some I've had," Jace said and she could feel him shrug. "And plus, that's _not_ going to happen. Just focus on me; I'll do the rest."

"Are you sure about that?" Jace often took the initiative when it came to innovative solutions and she had to admit that they usually didn't end in disaster, but this seemed like a little too much.

"Absolutely. Alec and I tried it last week, so I know where I'm going now."

"Fine," Maia sighed. He sounded almost proud of himself and it was enough for her to know that this wasn't a complete shot in the dark. " _Fine_. But if we get lost—"

"Hold that thought," Jace said cheerfully as he stepped even closer to the portal. "Here we go."

Thinking of Jace as a destination wasn't an easy feat, but Maia managed it somehow. The next thing she knew, they were out of the Institute and in what she presumed was a hotel room – it smelled of detergent and air freshener too much to be anything else – and she could hear the faint sound of waves in the background.

"You can look now." Jace's hands disappeared a moment later and Maia blinked to let her eyes adjust to the light for a moment before she took a look around.

The first thing she noticed was the view, through the open windows that took up half of the wall. The beach was almost directly under them and it was packed full of people, but that still wasn't enough to distract her from the sight in front of her; of its colours and scents and complete lack of familiarity.

"Where are we?" she asked, still trying to take it all in.

"Kauai," Jace said. He'd managed to sneak up behind her somehow, and was now leaning on the wall next to her. "Hawaii." Even without looking at him, Maia could see his eyes wandering between their surroundings and her, nervously trying to find something to focus on. "You like it?"

"I love it." She turned to him and pulled him down for a kiss. Jace seemed to take it as an invitation and stepped closer until Maia found herself sitting on the windowsill, back pressed against the warm glass behind her. It was still _fascinating_ ; the sudden change in her surroundings and all the new sensations that it brought with itself. "Thank you."

"Good!" Whatever tension she'd noticed before seemed to have vanished by now and Jace stepped back from the window to start looking through the packages someone had left in the middle of the bed. Maia vaguely wondered how long he'd been planning this for, but wasn't too surprised - just like almost everyone she'd met from the Institute, he was disciplined enough to try and make sure that nothing would go wrong with whatever strategy he'd devised. "We're here until tomorrow evening, and there are _so_ many things I want you to see first."

Her own package, as it turned out, contained the basics for diving equipment along with her swimsuit, which Jace had probably taken the last time he'd been at her place and while Maia would have usually made a point of telling him that it was advisable to _ask_ first, she couldn't exactly blame him - it was clear that he'd been hoping to keep all of this a surprise.

"So," she ventured instead as she studied the equipment. It was very likely that she already knew the answer to her question, but it never hurt to know for sure. "What's first on the list?"

"Diving," Jace said, sounding rather distracted as he tried to figure out his own suit. He had never done this before, Maia was ready to bet on it, even if she wouldn't know it by his demeanour. "I've booked us a session in an hour. _Apparently_ , there's a lot of marine life here and you said that you could never have enough field exercises, so..." He finally gave up and dropped the equipment back in the hectic pile they'd originally found it in. "I thought it might be a good idea. What do you say?"

"Is it somewhere close by?" Maia got a nod in response. She was more intrigued than she wanted to admit - she had been on the lookout for such an opportunity for a while now - but she suspected that it still showed on her face. "Then let's go. I know you said it's in an hour," she cut him off before he'd had the chance to speak, "but the preparation takes longer than you think." Another nod, and this time she reached out to squeeze Jace's hand in her own, the gesture enough to pull him away from his attempts to put the suit back in its original position in the packaging. "We'll have to be very careful before we go in, or they'll notice that we're not their usual run of the mill tourists."

There was always that to worry about, of course. Maia sighed as she gathered the things they would need along with one of her notebooks - it wouldn't hurt to leave it somewhere close by for when they got out of the water and write about her findings while the memory was still fresh, and it would definitely make a good enough essay for one of her recent assignments. It was entirely possible that this would go horribly wrong, but to her own surprise, she was optimistic about the entire ordeal. Maybe, just maybe, the Shadow World wouldn't interfere with her life when she least wanted it to. Just this once.

 **o.O.o**

It all started perfectly fine. The rest of the heavy-duty equipment they were made to carry had taken quite a while to handle, as had the search for an instructor that had followed after that. Jace had started getting twitchy at some point - probably due to his runes being on display for everyone to see even if they could easily pass as tattoos - but Maia was too entranced by her surroundings to be impatient.

It was nothing like New York's beaches. Everything seemed more saturated here, the sea glistening under the afternoon sun in far too many shades of blue for her to count and even the scent of the water was different; richer with everything that hid in its depths. Everything that she would be able to see firsthand, not in her textbooks, in just a few minutes.

Okay, maybe she was a little impatient. But when the rebreather was attached to the back of her suit, it was clear that it had been worth the wait and, with a sign from their instructor, Maia stepped into the water.

"I hope there's no such thing as water demons," she said, just loud enough for Jace to be able to hear her. He had heard her, she was sure of it and after a moment or two, the silence from his end became a little unsettling. "Jace? There _is_ no such thing as water demons, right?"

"They do exist in theory." The apologetic glint in Jace's eyes - something Maia had become all too used to in the time she'd started seeing him far more often than she had ever expected - was the least comforting thing she had seen all day. All _month_ , possibly, if she didn't count the Selkie that had come to the _Hunter's Moon_ two weeks ago to shed its human skin there. "But even if there are any of them here, they must be harmless. This is the best resort on the entire island. If there were disappearances, people would _know_. Even mundanes can't be that oblivious."

"Is this really the time to test how oblivious mundanes can be?" Maia's whisper was more of a hiss now, but she stepped deeper into the water nevertheless. She wasn't inclined to allow any kind of demon species to ruin this for her; not when she had a demon hunter by her side anyway. "If this ends badly—"

"It won't," Jace said, one of his hands resting on her forearm. The touch was comforting even through the waterproof material they were both covered in, but not enough to calm her down completely. She hated demons, likely even more than most of the other residents of the Shadow World. Their stench in the air around them was usually strong enough to disorient her and it was the closest she ever came to feeling mundane again. It wasn't something she appreciated; not when it did nothing but make her even more unwilling to come close to them, making her an easier target. "I swear, it'll be okay. And if it isn't, I've got it covered."

Jace nodded to his side and it was only then that Maia noticed the blade he'd somehow managed to tape to the side of his suit. _Of course._

It was very likely that she'd made a terrible mistake by coming here, Maia thought mournfully, but she didn't let that stop her. He had proven that he'd actually planned this so far; if she didn't hesitate now and tried to stray far away from anything even remotely supernatural, then everything would be _fine_.

"Don't make me regret this," she said and, with one last look at Jace's all too earnest smile, dived abruptly under the surface.

 **o.O.o**

Yes, everything had started out just fine. The reef was everything that Maia had expected it to be and more; the sheer _amount_ of things to see was almost overwhelming and she only realised how deep she'd ventured when her instructor tapped her on the shoulder.

 _Right_. The limit was fifty feet. They'd been told that from the start and there was no way for Maia to let him know that nothing down here could really hurt her, so she'd gone with it, only to see Jace swim into her immediate field of vision, gesturing animatedly and holding his stele in one hand, its tip already glowing.

 _Oh. Oh, no._

He was holding something else as well; a small fish-like creature of clearly non-earthly origin that wiggled in his grip and went still only when he jabbed it with his stele. It didn't look dead - one of its eyes, as red as the anemone near their feet, was still staring at her with far too much clarity - but he thrust it into her hand without a moment's hesitation nevertheless while pointing frantically at it once their instructor came over to see what was taking so long.

This was it. She had _known_ that there could be demons here, but not shapeshifters and nothing clever enough to actually try and lure two people to their death instead of just attacking. And if this wasn't Jace, then where was he? He had been wandering around just like her, chasing an eel around the nearest rock until it had buried itself in the sand and there had been no hint of a fight in the water around her even when Maia had lost sight of him.

Except the supposed demon was leading them up, making his way to the surface with the sharp, curt movements she had always associated with the Nephilim and Maia found herself relaxing. There was no demon threat, then; just Jace being Jace.

"Can you tell me what it is?" She heard him ask as soon as she'd broken through the surface of the water. Their instructor was shaking his head. "I found it in a coral."

Definitely Jace, then; there was no one else who would have the guts to shove a tiny water demon into a mundane's face and ask for information.

"No," the man said and carefully pried it out of Maia's hand where she was still holding it in the water. "I've never seen anything like it. But we'll need to release it as soon as possible."

"Of course," Maia said and watched in mind bewilderment as the creature swam off much faster than any fish she had ever studied would. Even given the circumstances, she didn't have the heart to do anything else but let it go back to the place where they'd found it. The ecosystem was _fragile_ here; enough that relatively harmless demons such as this one had likely become a part of it already. "I suppose I couldn't stay and study it?"

"You could, if you're licensed to do it," the instructor said as they waded through the shallow waters and found themselves back at their starting point. "If this is something you're interested in, it could be arranged."

She would do it one day. It didn't matter that it was a demon, Maia decided; once she graduated, she would come back. The Shadow World wasn't all that unwelcome into the picture of her future work all of a sudden, instead feeling like an unforeseen addition that she would love nothing more than to see ready to be explored in front of her.

"Drink of choice?" The instructor asked, pulling her out of the idyllic image in her mind, and Maia was just about to ask what he meant when Jace responded.

"Lava Flow, thank you," he said. "If you could bring it to the beach—"

"Of course," the man nodded and Maia let herself be led away from the entrance of the hotel and towards the chaise lounges in the near distance. She didn't speak again until they had taken their equipment off and she was sure that the waiter who had brought them their drinks was out of earshot, and once she was, she still leant in closer to Jace just in case. It was better to be safe than sorry, especially when they were on the territory of an Institute neither of them knew much about.

"What was that for?"

"He had no idea it was a demon," Jace said. He sounded inordinately pleased with himself and his grin only broadened at Maia's disapproving scowl. "What? It was harmless. When I made our reservations, they told me that if we found a fish our instructor couldn't name, they'd give us six of whatever local drinks we choose for free."

"You went demon hunting underwater for drinks on the house?" Maia was rather resigned to the idea by now; a side effect of their relationship that she hadn't anticipated. "You are so _cheap_ , Herondale."

"I also just wanted to go on a hunt underwater," Jace admitted with a sideways glance at her, as if he was wondering how the information would be received. "But it was _fun_ , wasn't it? What's life without a little magic?"

"Demon-free?" Maia asked, but there was no heat in the words, her hand extending towards Jace's. "A lot emptier, though. I think I prefer this."

"Me too," Jace said and Maia didn't even have to look at him to know that he was smiling; her eyes fixed on the sky and the stars that the night slowly scattered over it as their fingers intertwined in the space between them.


End file.
